On page 139, Wallace gives us a very funny memo sent from one State Farm employee to another. The memo quotes from an insurance claim. Because I know there are folks who aren’t quite caught up yet, and because this discussion is specifically about Wallace’s choices in telling it, here is the passage as it appears in the novel:

Dear Sir:

I am writing in response to your request for additional information. In block #3 of the accident reporting form, I put “trying to do the job alone”, as the cause of my accident. You said in your letter that I should explain more fully and I trust that the following details will be sufficient.

I am a bricklayer by trade. On the day of the accident, March 27, I was working alone on the roof of a new six story building. When I completed my work, I discovered that I had about 900 kg. of brick left over. Rather than laboriously carry the bricks down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel by using a pulley which fortunately was attached to the side of the building at the sixth floor. Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out and loaded the brick into it. Then I went back to the ground and untied the rope, holding it tightly to insure a slow descent of the 900 kg of bricks. You will note in block #11 of the accident reporting form that I weigh 75 kg.

Due to my surprise at being jerked off the ground so suddenly, I lost my presence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to say, I proceeded at a rapid rate up the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor I met the barrel coming down. This explains the fractured skull and the broken collar bone.

Slowed only slightly, I continued my rapid ascent not stopping until the fingers of my right hand were two knuckles deep into the pulleys. Fortunately, by this time, I had regained my presence of mind, and was able to hold tightly to the rope in spite of considerable pain. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground and the bottom fell out of the barrel from the force of hitting the ground.

Devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel now weighed approximately 30 kg. I refer you again to my weight of 75 kg in block #11. As you could imagine, still holding the rope, I began a rather rapid descent from the pulley down the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the two fractured ankles and the laceration of my legs and lower body.

The encounter with the barrel slowed me enough to lessen my impact with the brick-strewn ground below. I am sorry to report, however, that as I lay there on the bricks in considerable pain, unable to stand or move and watching the empty barrel six stories above me, I again lost my presence of mind and unfortunately let go of the rope, causing the barrel to begin a… endtranslNTCOM626

Like a lot of folks I’m sure, I read that piece with an acute sense of deja vu. I not only knew the story, I knew specific phrases were coming even before I read them.

My uncle was in the insurance business and he often sent me and my dad and my brothers funny things he encountered (this was in the actual mail, before the days of the casual email forward). I not only remembered getting this story, an alleged insurance claim from somewhere, but I remembered it being identical to Wallace’s text, almost word-for-word.

My first inclination was that Wallace could not have possibly just cut-and-pasted this whole episode from somewhere else. I considered that maybe my memory was faulty–that Wallace had rewritten an old urban legend with such skill that his version had since become the definitive one. And that my Uncle Tom had sent this to me, not in the late 80s when I was in college, but in the late 90s after Infinite Jest had been released.

Except.

You can find this story in all corners of the Internet with just minor variations. The following appeared on a University of Vermont ListServ dated February of 1996, the same month Infinite Jest was published. The words in bold also appear in the IJ version:

Dear Sir:

I am writing in response to your request for additional information in Block #3 of the accident reporting form. I put “Poor Planning” as the cause of my accident. You asked for a fuller explanation and I trust the following details will be sufficient.

I am a bricklayer by trade. On the day of the accident, I was working alone on the roof of a new six-story building. When I completed my work, I found I had some bricks left over which when weighed later were found to weigh 240 lbs. Rather than carry the bricks down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrelby using a pulleywhich was attached to the side of the building at the sixth floor. Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out and loaded the bricks into it. Then I went down and untied the rope, holding it tightly to insure a slow descent of the 240 lbs of bricks. You will note on the accident reporting form that my weight is 135 lbs.

Due to my surprise at being jerked off the ground so suddenly, I lost my presence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope.Needless to say, I proceeded at a rapid rate up the side of the building.

In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel which was now proceeding downward at an equally impressive speed. This explains the fractured skull, minor abrasions and the broken collarbone, as listed in Section 3 of the accident reporting form.

Slowed only slightly, I continued my rapid ascent, not stopping until the fingers of my right hand were two knuckles deep into the pulley which I mentioned in Paragraph 2 of this correspondence. Fortunately by this time I had regained my presence of mindand was able to hold tightly to the rope,in spite of the excruciating pain I was now beginning to experience. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground, and the bottom fell out of the barrel.

Now devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel weighed approximately 50 lbs. I refer you again to my weight. As you might imagine, I began a rapid descent down the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the two fractured ankles, broken tooth and severe lacerations of my legs and lower body.

Here my luck began to change slightly. The encounter with the barrel seemed to slow me enough to lessen my injuries when I fell into the pile of bricks and fortunately only three vertebrae were cracked. I am sorry to report, however,as I lay there on the pile of bricks, in pain, unable to move and watching the empty barrel six stories above me, I again lost my composure and presence of mind and let go of the rope.

This is a very old story, one apparently even better known in the British Isles, where it’s said that most comedians of the mid-century had some version of it in their repertoire.20 The insurance claim conceit seems to be a more recent development. It appears in Mike Metcalfe’s 1996 textbook Reading Critically in a form almost identical to the one in Infinite Jest. This version also appeared in a 1982 Louisville Courier-Journal column by Byron Crawford. It’s not available on the internet, but except for a few minor details the text of that article is virtually identical to the text in Infinite Jest. 21

All of that was to confirm what many of you already know–David Foster Wallace lifted the text of the entire episode from a pass-around joke. And I was surprised to realize that I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It surprised me because if a writer had copied someone else’s words so blatantly and without acknowledgment into any other novel I would have been indignant. I wouldn’t have seen any grey area at all. I would have said it was wrong.

But in this particular context, Wallace’s use of this old story is awfully effective. It’s just one of a series of references to urban legends throughout the book, including one to a famous story about toothbrush mischief that Wallace appropriates with more originality. I suppose he’s trying to point out the unreliable nature of any narrative, that our faith in them is something of an illusion. There is also a recurring theme about control that is explicitly described in an earlier scene,22 which takes place in the ETA weight room. It’s one of my favorite lines in the book so far: “Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down.”

I dig all of that.

Still I’m not entirely convinced the ends justify the means. Borrowing and sampling might be done casually by other artists, but words are still sacred to writers. There were a lot ways Wallace might have rewritten this story to make it his own. Whatever your aim, you simply don’t swipe another writer’s words and phrases without acknowledging you’re doing it. 23

Of course Wallace knew all that, and so we have to conclude that he didn’t do it to deceive and had some other purpose in mind. I suppose he was hoping that readers who knew the story would recognize it, but readers who didn’t know it (which was probably most of them in the nascent days of the Internet when this novel was published) would just assume it was original. We’re back now to the discussion of what the reader brings to the novel. The reader who is familiar with that story will probably react to its appearance differently than one who thinks it’s the product of Wallace’s original wit. I suspect Wallace would have anticipated that, too.

Arrgh.

So I’m curious what all y’all think. Those who are reading IJ for the third time and those who are reading it for the first. Those who recognized the bricklayer story when they read it and those who didn’t. Where do you come down on this? Is this appropriation of another (unknown) person’s material valid? Or not? Is it okay because it’s a piece of narrative flotsam, the cultural equivalent of abandoned property? If we could attribute authorship to someone, would claiming it be less acceptable? 24 Is it because Infinite Jest seems to be so singular an accomplishment that it frustrates our desire to apply these kinds of standards to it? 25

I recognized the story both the first time I read IJ and this second time ’round, and I think I sort of shrugged and moved on both times. It isn’t (to my mind) either as funny or as interesting as other asides in the text — like the brief history of video-phones — and learning that the actual text might be unoriginal is both unsurprising and disappointing.

But I can’t say I feel upset or betrayed to learn it, either. I just wish I knew why Wallace thought it was worth including, regardless of its original source.

I recognized the bricklayer story almost immediately. I remember having three thoughts about the story as I read it.
1.) It’s still funny.
2.) Why? Oh, why is this here?
3.) Feeling a little lost and let down. I could not ascertain the meaning of this story in context to what I had already read.

Bit’s and pieces resembling a whole. The narrative is always in the moment.

I had a weird experience reading the bricklayer bit. Obviously I feel that DFW is an incredibly original an inventive writer, and yet, that “bit” seemed not-quite-DFWish. It didn’t feel like he wrote it, I guess…maybe the tempo, the pacing, something about it made it seem cribbed from somewhere else. I has also of course heard of the toothbrush mischief, and didn’t really think he’d made it up, but somehow that seemed more par for his work.

As to both of these things (and slightly off-topic the seemingly endless references to garden gnomes on vacation, which was in Amelie, but I believe was circulating on the Web before that movie)… if you can use it in an original way, I’m okay with that. As you mention for the toothbrush scene, it was delightfully set up as an unexpected punchline–that Gately had probably heard of it being done and then did it to someone else.

The bricklayer story, copped almost word for word, well (and maybe I’m too sympathetic to DFW about this) I’m cutting him slack on it because it is a tiny bit in a huge work. If the bricklayer bit was the bulk of a much shorter story, I’d cry foul. But as it stands, and in the context that it is sent (as a forwarded email), I think it is just one of the many things floating around the Jestiverse.

There seems to be many things in the story that are appropriated from elsewhere, and yet since the bulk of the work is quite original, I think of it more as a comprehensive look at the world and, as in other scenes, not leaving anything out.

I’m behind in the reading, so I just got to this part today, but I’m kind of surprised by all the flurry over it, because, to me, this sort of thing has been happening all along. For example, on page 32 when Hal answers the phone, and the voice says, “I want to tell you. My head is filled with things to say.” That’s a lyric from a George Harrison song on Revolver. Another lyric from that song: “I don’t mind. I could wait forever.”

It’s an obscure lyric from an obscure Beatle song — only a die hard fan would even notice, it’s not credited, and it’s not even RELEVANT.

It’s just a joke, and I found it funny. The bricklayer story wasn’t as funny, but you can’t win ‘em all…

I don’t want to belabor the point, but just to clarify what we’re talking about. There are a lot of playful pop culture references in this book and the Beatles lyric is one. But this is more than a reference. To make it comparable, I think, you’d have to have to reproduce the entire song and claim, say, that Hal wrote it.

I had read the bricklayer story somewhere else (Readers Digest?)years ago, and I immediately recognized it as not original. So for me the question was (and, at this point in my reading of the book, remains): Why did Wallace choose to include this? We know (especially in light of the previous post by Michael Pietsch) that everything in the book is there for a reason. Sure, it’s an amusing anecdote, and it relates to the bit about the weight-room guru, but there must be more to it than that. I’m still waiting to see how this puzzle piece fits into the larger whole, and I have faith that it will. But the fact that it is not original and not explicitly cited as such does not bother me.

I’m OK with the idea of a “found object” in a literary work, but pretty much only when the work makes clear that the inserted writing is a found object. I’d love to think that somewhere in the massive tome that is IJ we’ll come upon a cross-reference to the bricklayer passage that will clarify its provenance and what it’s doing in this novel.

This reminds me of Michael Chabon’s lecture about a fake Holocaust survivor story, which itself was “fake” in that Chabon made it up while presenting it in his lecture without mentioning that fact. I don’t think the BookForm article that called this a “hoax” is online, but this New York Times story is.

As someone who attended his lecture, I felt ambivalent about Chabon. It seemed fishy to me when I heard it, but I didn’t follow it up until I read the BookForum article. On the face of it, it seemed dishonest, but upon reflection, it seemed like just the thing a novelist like Chabon would do.

As for Wallace, it seems clear to me that he wasn’t trying to pull one over on anyone. I remember laughing at this story the first time I read IJ, and I didn’t realize it was appropriated, but I don’t feel bad about that. Re-writing it in his own words would almost feel more dishonest, as if he were trying to hide something. It’s as if a novelist used a Nigerian scam email in a novel. Re-writing it would be beside the point.

I really don’t have much of a problem with it. Even if it was another offer that just tossed in a well-known chain mail, I wouldn’t worry about it.

I think Mynameisnotlinda’s idea about the claimant being drunk (the nameless founder?) and just using this story he’d heard is an interesting take on it. I’m not sure if it works as the email memo from ‘murrayf’ mentions that the events had been confirmed by witnesses (though perhaps they were just going along with a joke).

Why get all up in arms about it? It’s not like he was trying to get away with anything, I’m sure he knew that pretty much everyone reading his book would have known about the bricklayer story.

I’m ahead in the reading, and I don’t have /IJ/ with me to check, but isn’t there a scene where one of the ETA kids is plagiarizing a scholarly document about the Wheelchair Assassins? I can’t remember the kid, but I think he’s plagiarizing Erdeddy. So, at any rate, there’s at least one instance of plagiarism as theme in /IJ/.

Also, a reference to this story show up later in /IJ/ (I’ll have to add page numbers later, somewhere in the 500s) as having happened to one of the “House House” residents. It seems possible to me that in this case the character is the plagiarist, because it appears in /IJ/ in the form of an actual insurance claim, an actual letter. I’d actually have a problem with the whole-cloth appropriation if it showed up as an actual scene.

I had forgotten the later reference to the story, but as I was rereading the bricklayer bit just now, I noticed that the claimant is named Dwayne Glynn. There is an Ennet House resident named Doony Glynn (mentioned and of little consequence in next week’s milestone) who could be the same person.

There’s a relevant paragraph describing Glynn on page 543 that I won’t reprint bc it could be considered a (mild, not really significant) spoiler. If interested, it’s the middle paragraph that starts “Glynn..”

I think that 543′s description sort of absolves Wallace’s use of the bricklayer anecdote, but again I don’t want to spoil anything.

If IJ is all about what we should be paying attention to, is this bit meant to be a criticism of the state or scholarly inquiry?

It’s not unintentional that we get the bricklayer story in such close proximity to the Wheelchair Assassin term paper episode. In that scene, the better part of the narrative is given over to how one incorporates secondary research (and what is referencing existing works if not secondary research?)into what is supposed to be a work of new inquiry … it’s a long set piece on intellectual appropriation.

What Wallace may have been doing is playing with degrees of appropriation; asking, in essence, “is there really that big a difference between a scholarly work that draws all its source material from previously published work (paraphrasing and re-writing notwithstanding) and wholesale inclusion of previously ‘published’ work?”

CLARIFICATION: Sorry, I’m doing this too quickly. The “this story” in my second paragraph refers to the Insurance Claim story. Also, I want to make it clear that what comes up in /IJ/ later on is that the claim was actually made by one of the addicts prior to his admission to the halfway house (which I referred to as “House House” above).

I should have edited before I posted. My point, if it wasn’t clear above: IMHO, the bricklayer story shows up in /IJ/ as an instance of a character’s plagiarism not the author’s.

I read the whole thing as a (somewhat parenthetical) elaborative tangent on the “don’t try to lift more than your own weight” maxim by way of recounting an old yarn. Wallace is saying: look, this is just common sense (and an important point in this overall narrative), but people have been making such a mess of it for so long that it’s become an urban legend.

I suspect that Wallace expected a significant number of his readers to recognise the story. The Web was nascent (but growing) and listservs and gopher and email forwards had been around (especially on college campuses, and this is likely where quite a lot of copies of Infinite Jest were to wind up) for a number of years. I agree that there’s something unsettling about lifting anything wholesale for one’s work without acknowledgment, but also that Wallace was almost certainly fully aware of what he was doing, and that any number of people would have access to the necessary references to call him out on it.

The connection to Lyle makes perfect sense, actually. And, later on (Spoiler?) we see that both the advice Lyle gives to ETA students and the working principles of 12-step programs are simultaneously (1) unoriginal to the point of banality and (2) surprisingly profound anyway. So we’ve got a chain e-mail circulating, perhaps, because the people who pass it on recognize its value, on some level?

Great textual-critical-type work here, I had no idea the origin of the bricklayer story, but…
Yeah, isn’t this story in IJ *exactly* in the context of some forwarded e-mail story, “an urban legend being passed around by email or whatever”? Sure there’re some internal e-mail framing devices, but what crazy, obnoxious e-mail legends *don’t* have framing devices making them seem to genuine or different in subtle ways?
My take is that this is essentially Wallace writing at the cusp of the age-of-obnoxious-e-mail-stories parodying the whole process.

But, the bricklayer story is presented as a chain letter / crappy e-mail forward way. Like, get a load of this fantastic story I just heard, you won’t believe this, I’m just passing it on, etc. It is presented in the same way that many of you probably saw it for the fist time, but this time it has little details added in that make it fit with the rest of the text: metro Boston, blood-alcohol of .3+, etc.

As for the story itself – it feels like a classic AA story of how “my own best thinking got me here”. It’s funny, because it is absurd, but it shows how over-thinking can have dangerous and unforeseen consequences. Especially when the initial premise is faulty.

First read IJ when it came out, and had already heard the brick story (as well as the toothbrush story) and was completely un-bothered by its use.

On a simple level, by including it as a quote within an email forward, DFW gave about as good of a “citation” as you could give of a piece of old pop culture flotsam of unknown authorship — in fact, the decision to set it within a fake email forward even provides an appropriate acknowledgement that the text of the anecdote is largely not DFW’s own creation.

On a more complexificated level, there is something I like about the pattern of using urban myths (whether well-known ones like the toothbrush or ones more specific to the novel, like herds of feral hamsters) as stepping-off points for characters. I think of it like this: In his nonfiction, DFW had a gift for using real people/interactions as anchors for devious flights of prose that were culturally insightful (Mona, with “the tiny delicate pale unhappy face of a kind of corrupt
doll” and her interactions with her granparents in his cruise ship piece comes to mind, for example). An urban legend, in his fiction, becomes a parallel and oddly “true” way of anchoring some characters to the world we live in, even as DFW then develops them to his own ends in the novel.

As you say, it’s a pass-around joke. If Wallace had had one of his characters tell a well-known knock-knock joke or limerick, I wonder if you would have the same concerns. Probably not. This is a longer thing, of course, and so may seem like a more significant rip-off.

I think that if Wallace were appropriating the story and dramatizing it (with all its particulars) with one of his characters at its center, there might be an issue. But he’s taking the story within a context (forwarded email) in which many of us know about it in the first place and including it as a sort of pop cultural reference. It’s an imported document (rather like the other imported documents that follow in the next few sections). Technically, I suppose it is something of an unattributed rip-off, but I think he’s done what he can — especially considering that a thing like this is probably all but impossible to attribute to a single person — to provide appropriate context. It’s a funny anecdote, but it’s not so funny that a differently funny guy like Wallace would earnestly hope to pass it off as his own.

Stories within stories are kind of a thing in Wallace’s work, by the way.

One thing strikes me about this section: Although the message text suggests that it is a forwarded or pasted message, it appears to be the first instance of forwarding. So maybe Wallace is playing with origin here, as he does elsewhere in the book (origin of The Entertainment, origin of Hal’s issues as evident in the opening section, even word origin). Maybe he’s pretending (though your research proves the pretension wrong) that this is the first forward of the well-known anecdote, thereby sort of nodding to the fact that it has a life outside of his own text.

The correspondence you mention to the advice Lyle gives isn’t one I had noticed, and I suppose it sort of explains why this otherwise anomalous passage appears in the book.

The bricklayer story is the first obvious instance (other than the toothbrushes, which is a bit more subtle) of a handful of “well known” late-1990s urban legends scattered throughout the book. Remember, that in 1996 the Internet was not ubiquitious as it is now, and I think this chapter is a prescient indication of the way that the Internet enables preservation and recycling of these “pieces of cultural flotsam”.

“There were a lot ways Wallace might have rewritten this story to make it his own. Whatever your aim, you simply don’t swipe another writer’s words and phrases without acknowledging you’re doing it.”

Who’s “the writer” in this case? Doesn’t your entire post indicate that this is “pass-around joke” a piece of culture that has circulated and recirculated in various cultures for years? Who “owns” this story?

I’m not sure “lifting” is the right word at all here. This is a citation, a reference to a common story/joke. In fact, I think it’s even more interesting that Wallace didn’t provide a true “citation” given the numerous footnotes provided. Who would he footnote? Which version of the joke/story? Who created the “original”? Seems like these are the kinds of (much more interesting) questions raised by the inclusion of this story.

As I see it, words are not (in your words) “sacred” to DFW. In fact his irreverence for everything (the standard novel form first and foremost) is what makes him such an interesting writer.

We have been trained by the copyright police to think about intellectual property in the wrong way. Nothing was stolen or lifted here. All culture builds on the past (see Lawrence Lessig’s work for a detailed version of this argument).

There’s something I find honest in the plagiarizing, like the old Japanese potters that would knock their perfect teacups just a bit off kilter after they’d thrown them, not deceiving the world into believing there could be a perfect thing.

There is DFW, sitting in living rooms of halfway houses, going to AA meetings and taking notes. Like every great work of literature- and I am convinced this is a great work of literature- it’s a shameless rip off of the anonymous lives of real people, some of whom made it, some of whom didn’t, and very few of whom ever achieved the immortality or esteem that the man ripping off their lives would. No wonder many great artists feel like frauds- they are frauds, if integrity requires a work to spring forth fully finished from the head of the author like Athena from Zeus. X that- even Zeus has to eat a pregnant woman.

Why not a word for word urban legend? He stole the stories, he stole the wisdom, he even, in a weird way, stole from his own life. And he presented it to a culture that is told that for something to be really true and good it must have a xenogenesis, even though it emerges from another human accretion of that culture. No wonder our writers get so depressed. It’s an impossible request that leads to authorial lying in order to be lifted up as honest.

So here: here is an urban legend you will know, and he has appropriated, stripped the context away, and made part of this mad scene about how far down people go before they get to the halfway house. Just because you will know it, doesn’t make it any more stolen than the rest.

I say it’s fine because (a) there’s no original author to ask permission anyway, and (b) I’m actually surprised there’s someone who *hasn’t* heard this old bit.

Look back at Joyce and see how much contemporary pop culture detritus he appropriated. It goes from bits of doggerel sung in the streets to common misconceptions of Catholic dogma. It not only fills out the world, but the common elements root the IJ world within our own.

Great stuff all. For me what was most interesting about the use of this legend is that Wallace actually could not have reasonably expected most readers to know this story. Instead he would have expected some to know it and others–if not most in 1996–to be oblivious to it. So the story has two different audiences.

I’m unconvinced that this memo is supposed to be a forwarded joke. I think it’s supposed to be an actual correspondence between two State Farm employees. But the paragraph Conor cites on p. 543 explains what this story is doing here. It makes perfect sense. And it’s great. And I think you can safely go and read just that graf without feeling very much has been spoiled.

I’ll also add something else John Warner said when we were discussing this: “Thinking about what Wallace’s reaction to this might be, he’d probably cop to it immediately and then lay out fifteen different angles to come at it from, share his ultimate rationale for the choice and then undercut that choice completely. The inherent tension in all his work is an effort to come up with satisfactory explanations for life and behavior, but at every turn he recognizes the impossibility of doing so.”

You’re correct. It’s not a forwarded joke. It’s an actual (within the story, at least) claim forwarded to coworkers for a laugh. So it is a forward, but it’s not yet a joke or urban legend within the context of the novel.

You are right that the context in the novel is not as a joke — which is similar to how the toothbrush incident is re-contextualized. The toothbrush urban legend, as I’ve heard it, focuses on/identifies with the horror of the homeowner receiving the photos, whereas in the novel, we get the incident from the point of view of the perpetrator, Gately, who we are inclined to identify with, and who has an actual motive (revenge on the A.D.A) for his actions that is at least slightly understandable. Doony Glynn may not be as central or as sympathetic as Gately, but the brick story similarly gains a new resonance beyond its initial humor by acting as part of his addiction backstory.

I don’t know that Gately’s a terribly sympathetic character so early in the novel (he’s just a drug-seeking thug, if I recall correctly), but I do agree with your point about the resonance as part of a backstory.

It seems to me that Michael Pietsch might be the only person around who could answer this question for us. Maybe at the end our Infinite Summer we could pick our 10 most burning questions and see if he’d address them?

The idea that urban legends are a theme of IJ may answer the question I posted to the daily discussion forum about the recurring references to Lemon Pledge as sunscreen. The Lemon Pledge thing was probably intended to be understood as an urban legend of the tennis circuit, even if invented entirely by DFW.

Why is the bricklayer story included? For anyone who is still asking, it’s been answered. A few times already in this thread: It’s used as a parallel to Lyle’s weightroom koan.

As for its relationship to questions of authorship and/or plagiarism, I happen to think that’s a very tenuous proposal. If something is an urban legend with no known original author/speaker, it cannot be plagiarized. It can only be passed along. Would you say that the Brothers Grimm “plagiarized” the story of Hansel and Gretel? It had been extant in various forms in the German oral culture for decades before they made a version of it popular.

Folklore, urban legends, and tall tales are ways that a culture “talks to itself,” and when someone repeats them it’s merely to keep that voice alive.

I think that’s all Wallace is doing here, as far as his technique is concerned–drawing our attention to one of the new ways in which we tell stories to ourselves, mainly by passing them along on the Internet or through e-mail.

John Warner must have been thinking of this interview Wallace gave in the Spring ’93 issue of “Whiskey Island” (you can access the full and must-read interview at the premiere DFW web hub, http://www.TheHowlingFantods.com/dfw/):

“Q: In your stories, you often play w/ the boundaries between history and fiction. Does it feel odd appropriating historical figures?

“A: It’s got legal repercussions. The first draft of the Letterman story (“My Appearance”) was due to come out in /Playboy/, and it was very different. It had actual transcripts of an interview between Letterman and Susan St. James. I fucked up and didn’t tell the editors, and about two weeks before the story was due to come out they reran that interview and a couple of people from /Playboy/ saw it, and I got a new asshole drilled. And all the other magazines that ran my stories, their lawyers were running around screaming, and the book almost didn’t come out. So there are problems that way.

“…Fiction’s job used to be to make the strange familiar, to take you somewhere and let you feel that this was familiar to you. It seems that one of the things about living now is that /everything/ presents itself as familiar, so one of the things the artist has to do now is take a lot of this familiarity and remind people that it’s strange. So to take the most banal, low-art images from television and from politics and from advertising, and to transfigure them — OK, it’s sort of a heavy art gesture — but I think it’s got some validity. I think if you can estrange this stuff, and you can make people look at, say, “Jeopardy!” or an advertisement and view it not as a message from God, but as a piece of art, a product of the human imagination and human effort with a human agenda, that there’s a way in which you distance a reader from phenomena that I think he needs to be distanced from. It’s not that all this stuff is in your mind as you’re doing it. This is just one of the defenses I’ve made up for the questions that come up about it, and I think it’s valid.” (pg. 56)

“Matt Evans says:
July 8, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Thank you both for the corrections. I was indeed thinking of the pg 543 reference that takes care of matter.”

I suppose this kept going because people that haven’t read the book before didn’t want to skim that far ahead, but this really seems to address the issue and wrap things up quite nicely. I had noticed the comment too about Lyle watching the boy in the weight room, so this must be some kind of ongoing theme throughout the book. This is the exact sort of work and small detail being pointed out that made me want to re-read the book along with a group!

All good points, but I also want to point out that I never suggested that this might be “plagiarism.” That implies an intent to deceive that just doesn’t apply here. At the same time, I don’t think it’s quite as simple as ray gunn puts it. I’m a novelist and I don’t think I would copy something to the extent that Wallace does here and insert it in one of my novels without carefully considering how it would be understood by the reader. I really don’t think Wallace did it casually either, which is why I wanted to open up a discussion about the considerations he made. And this has been a very good conversation.

I’m also not entirely convinced by the argument that just because we don’t know who the author is, his words are simply fair game. There is a distinction to be made here between the story about the bricklayer and the barrel of bricks and this particular version which has its own distinctions and clever turns of phrase. Someone really did write that and probably took a lot of pride in it and they did it probably not all that long ago. The fact that this version has become popular to the exclusion of past versions is actually a testament to the skill with which it was written.

The skill of the particular version of a widely distributed joke, urban legend, or other text is exists alongside at least two other at least equally (and in my opinion more) important factors that would bring them to the attention of DFW or another writer:

1. Their widespread nature. The basic text of the nigerian minister email solicitations is fairly stable, but, even aside from its status as an attempted con, I don’t think writers/late nite comics/mock-inspirational poster makers should feel guilty reproducing it for their own purposes, not just because it is annonymous, but because it is so damn inescapable that appropriation seems practically self defense of our mental resources.

2. folk legends and jokes, like a lot of folk songs, seem to emerge from a sort of accretive mass authorship, with particular phrasings that work preserved in new retellings…The comedian who tells their own version of the “aristocrats” joke will likely retain certain phrasings they liked in a version they heard, while adding their own twists. I kinda suspect the version DFW used was polished through a few different voices before it stabilized in that version.

Kevin, you’re quite right. It’s not as simple as my glib comment might imply. It invites us to consider why some apocryphal stories get perpetuated and others don’t, which is hardly a simple matter at all. In fact, cracking the code of how stories spread is the sole aim of marketers and admen worldwide and none of them have figured it out. On top of that, as you rightly point out, is the fact that although it is without attribution, this story did have an original creator and the fact that this version is given preference over any other permutation is worth our time to consider.

“Mr. Squishy” might have been the first DFW fiction I ever read. It first appeared in McSweeney’s 5 under the pseud “Elizabeth Klemm.” Readers pretty quickly outed the author as Wallace, but both he and Dave Eggers denied it for quite a while as I recall.

I was working in an ad agency at the time and so I found it very funny. At the same time, I’ll admit I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I should go back and read it again.

I hadn’t heard the story before, but something about it read funny to me. It felt out of place. However, I did remember the yogi’s advice from the weight room, and decided that that was the connection. I’m really curious to go read page 543, but I will refrain. However, I’m having a blast watching the MythBusters episode. Thanks for the link!

Geste, I think that’s completely valid. Nevertheless, let me continue to play devil’s advocate with a couple of points.

I don’t think this story is iconic in the way that the Nigerian scam is. Even with the Internet helping to spread it for the last 15 years, we’ve seen several people today who still hadn’t heard it.

Also, one thing that is interesting about this story is that the insurance claim version seems to have changed very little. The newspaper column from 1982 (which was read to me over the phone) and the one that appeared in IJ (and the versions posted recently that you can still find with a Google search) are generally identical with insignificant changes (as in the examples above). Indeed, Wallace could have tweaked it significantly if he thought that would better suit his purposes, but he didn’t.

Of course, I think that’s in part because he hoped people would recognize it. My question (and I’m wrestling with it less now that i’ve seen the context in which this episode is placed on future pages) was whether or not Wallace had any responsibility to the readers who did not. I still think the answer might be yes, but I now also think Wallace probably meets that standard when he ties it back in later.

I think the funny bit here is the insurance rep forwards this to show what a rube the claimant is, but the claimant has obviously heard this story and is trying to run it past the (clueless) insurance rep, playing him as the rube.

I’m not sure what to make of that in the context of the novel, and I hadn’t heard the story before. It seemed a little slapstick and out of place, though certain turns of phrase fit in nicely with the rest of the novel.

I guess, to the whole discussion of the ethics of the thing, the points to consider would include these:

1) That repeating, with or without significant changes, jokes and other folk culture isn’t usually seen as lifting anything.
2) That lifting texts word for word generally is (seen as lifting something).
3) That DFW knew a large percentage of his audience would immediately recognize this story as something appropriated.
4) That sampling has a history in post-modern fiction and certain modern and post-modern forms of music.
5) That the instance is framed and the framing device has a distancing effect (putting the “author” of the joke here at several removes).

Wheat, I’m actually not sure you’ve got it quite right. The text above the anecdote does have a “what a rube” feel to it, but it’s also kind of official business, as it discusses liability, etc. It also says that the basic facts are confirmed by witnesses and a CYD (what’s that?) accident report. So the event seems to have happened. Of course, as we see Glynn later, he doesn’t seem quite like the sort of fellow who would have penned this letter. So there’s still sort of a lack of clarity. Did Glynn know of the anecdote and use its well-worded text to fit his own case in hopes of winning his claim? Or is he supposed to have actually written the thing (and with or without help?)? I guess this all loops back into the reliable narrator stuff, though in this case it’s not even a narrator so much as a purveyor of external text, of which there are a number in the book (start with the AFR text being cribbed and the filmography and continue through the next dozen or so pages after the bricklayer anecdote). Heck, if you take text in the critical rather than the literal sense, JOI is also a purveyor of external text. I don’t really have anywhere to go with this point. Just noodling around with the ideas a bit.

So are you saying DFW didn’t rip this off, Doony Glynn did? I like it!

I also like the philology that’s going on here, particularly in the original quoted section with the similarities highlighted. And tracing the story back to versions in turn of the century joke books. It’s like figuring out which parts of the bible are “original” by analyzing the variations, looking for conservation. Or looking at evolution by analyzing homologous portions of genes between species. Seeing which regions are stable and which drift…

I read this while listening to fiddle songs played on the banjo. Some of these songs have been around for hundreds of years, though the particular ones I’m listening to were transcribed from specific solos played on specific dates by a particular fiddler. Fully attributed, in other words.

It’s just a yarn, there’s no documented case of it happening. It was even one of the mini-myths featured in an episode of “Urban Legends” after a main section, before the show went into the next. Also Snopes has an article about it. http://www.snopes.com/humor/letters/bricks.asp

This thread reminds me that the topic of plagiarism has come up previously (or subsequently?) in IJ if you think back (forward?) to endnote 304 in which Struck is flagrantly copying passages of an article for a school paper he is writing on the Wheelchair Assassins. Could DFW’s own apparent plagiarism here be intentionally related somehow?

There are so many seemingly random little connections strewn throughout the book, such as the connection that Kevin points out in his post between the brick story in and the weight room scenario on page 128.

The point of these little connections is beyond guessing at at this point but they do sort of add to the fun of reading it, for me anyway.

I thought of that, too. And it surely must be related. Here’s an interesting bit from note 304: “What’s interesting to Hal [ . . . ] is that congenital plagiarists put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take to just write up an assignment from conceptual scratch. It seems like plagiarists aren’t lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure” (1061).

So, is DWF a “congenital plagiarist”? I doubt it, and I’m not quite sure what comment he might want to make on the subject, but it’s clear enough that he’s in the process of making one.

[...] I am writing in response to your request for additional information in Block #3 of the accident reporting form. I put “Poor Planning” as the cause of my accident. You asked for a fuller explanation and I trust the following details will …Continue [...]

Admittedly, before reading this post, I was unaware that the bricklayer story–one of my favorite vignettes from the book–was pilfered from another source. Does that disappoint me? Hard to say…

In one sense, knowing that the bricklayer story is not an original DFDubyaism detracts a bit from the reader’s perception of Wallace’s wildly imaginative storytelling ability. On the other hand, when read in concert with the 1100+ other pages of incomparable literary awesomeness, the bricklayer nab seems to be a pretty negligible chink in ol’ DFW’s armor.

Also, I think it’s safe to say that Wallace didn’t hope to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes vis a vis the “original creation” of this urban legend.

Normally, I’m a pretty vehement advocate for artists’ right to sample others’ work. For anyone interested, I HIGHLY recommend DJ Spooky’s “Rhythm Science” for a wicked manifesto (complete with sample mix-tape!) on the merit of artistic sampling.

I had heard the Dubliners version of this years ago and recognised the bicklayer story immediately. However, I think that although it has been copied almost exactly from elsewhere, given the age of the piece and the widespread acknowledgment of it I can see DFW use totally without recriminations. As other people have said that this book is very similar to Hamlet in many respects, a little more harmless plagurism can’t hurt.

I did think it odd though, to see it in this book.

In the section it is in there are contrasting sections that sort of make it ‘fit’ with the story being told. It is followed be other short essays(?) that appear to be separate to the main narrative that is starting to come together at this point in the book.

One rarely envisions the consequences of “lack of planning”. This evocative – Rube Goldberg meets “The Roadrunner” human yo-yo mental imagery certainly made me chuckle. That it is a plagiarized source of later plagiarism is even funnier. Great insight folks.

I first heard the story on a recording by the famous English comedian, Gerard Hoffnung, played for me by an Itinerant Englishman /Scientist teaching his way around the world…this stop was at a small-town High Schoolin NW Wisconsin..in 1966.

At this point in the discussion there seems to be a general consensus that DFW is not guilty of plagiarism, and is probably not even being terribly disingenuous, and that the story is relevant to the text insofar as it provides exposition for an Ennet House resident and exemplifies the practicality of Lyle’s advice. But I am with Kevin; I think there is something more going on here.

I may be out in left field on this—having covertly exhaled illicit smoke through the whirling blades of my bathroom fan not long before coming up with this—but I think DFW’s revisions are key to understanding why this story/urban legend is included in the text. Looking at the DFW text and the ListServ text, one sees that most of the differences are minor stylistic changes and the metrification of measures of mass (not to mention substantially increasing the weight of the bricks to like really comic proportions), but the one that interests me is the difference in what the claimant lists as the cause. The ListServ claimant claims the cause as “poor planning,” which actually sounds more strictly business, albeit more vague thereby requiring clarification, than DFW’s “trying to do the job alone.” Other than sounding like a euphemism for masturbation—a thread I will pick up in just a moment—“trying to do the job alone” and miserably failing is a motif in the novel. Look at the Ennet House residents for instance. They must keep a strict regimen of attending meetings and getting active with their group if they want to have any hope of not returning Out There. There’s also the way substance abusers in the text, Erdedy and Hal for example, keep a separate, solitary, and often secretive existence as a user, and as they spend more time in this separate existence, their lives become less manageable. Then there’s all that stuff Marathe says to Steeply—who is, not insignificantly, divorced—about choice and selfishness, that when one’s choices are primarily selfish one becomes without foundation, free falling, alone (108). Not to let any spoilers drop, but Marathe continues lecturing Steeply on the selfishness of U.S.A.s through at least page 430.

W/r/t the possibility of masturbatory reference intentional or otherwise, there are frequent references to masturbation in the text. Most notably, there’s the example of O.N.A.N.—as in onanism (see daily discussion forum, “Toilet humor so far”). In the self imposed isolation of his bob hope binges, Erdedy masturbates excessively enough to require lubrication to prevent abrading the sensitive dermis of his glans penis—petroleum jelly is actually pretty thick, viscous stuff in terms of personal lubricant, so I’ve a feeling Erdedy is engaging in like a strenuous ritual of self abuse (21). Orrin suspects that Hal is always masturbating when he answers the phone, when he’s actually been getting high subterraneously, O. admitting he used to rub himself raw (136-35). In a way, O. is not far off, masturbation and substance abuse being very similar at a very basic level. In its most general definition, masturbation is an act of self indulgence, or ego cathexis if you tend towards the psychoanalytic. So masturbation gets tied in with this whole self indulgence/selfishness as self destruction theme emerging through the drug abuse/addiction, masturbatory acts/references, and ubiquitous T.P.s/death by Entertainment.

One last semi-coherent, cannabis addled thought as I wax Freudian… The libido operates on the pleasure principle, but ironically the ultimate pleasure in the end game of the pleasure principle is the return to the inanimate, “To die; to sleep; / No more.”

I was disappointed to find the bricklayer story, too.
It felt way too hoary to be original, and I was pretty sure I’d heard it years before. It really does trouble me. Perhaps I’m naive, but it seems to me that there’s an implicit promise of original content, even in a very long book. Not quitting to read it though!

I don’t see the problem with the bricklayer story as ‘plagiarism’: it appears in the book as a letter, so in the form in which it actually exists in its most familiar version. In other words, it’s simply lifted text from ‘the public domain.’ No copywright issue. As to whether we read it as DFW’s idea or not: that has to do with what you recognize and what you don’t, as with any encyclopedic fiction. Such fiction can incorporate text that isn’t original with the author.

There are some other things: a key detail about Madame Psychosis is lifted from the film “All That Jazz,” but that reference is mentioned, at least indirectly (as I recall); meanwhile, the plot of “Reuben, Reuben” (with the dentist) is lifted from that film with no credit. However, it may be that the plot of “Reuben, Reuben” was already lifted from an old joke or story, the way the bricklayer story is. I haven’t researched it.

But I have to mention this: in a writing course a few years ago, a student plagiarized the part about Erdedy waiting for his drug delivery. The student condensed it quite effectively and made some funny alterations; at the time I had just finished IJ and that segment was months in the past. I didn’t recognize it, though I did liken the subject matter to DFW when I spoke to the student. He had the opportunity to fess up that he had borrowed the situation and some of the language, but pretended instead that he hadn’t read it. Later, when I went back and checked IJ and saw the extent of his usage, I had to confront him and report it.

It’s a bit unsettling to me to see the passages in which DFW was doing the same thing!

[...] next one so clearly that you can actually predict what’s coming, but still it’s funny. Kevin’s post at Infinite Summer wonders about the propriety—and, more to the point, the effectiveness—of [...]